The Blomidon Logs

This is a beautiful book. Dwyer’s (Going to the Eyestone) poetry and prose are accomplished, clean, and deceptively simple, shifting between free verse and loosely structured forms. Consumed with meditation on place and how the author fits into her family home, the book slips neatly into conventions of East Coast Canadian writing wrought with a strong sense of place at the edge of the world, where land meets sea. Though Dwyer’s work moves beyond archetypes, readers may be troubled by her use of legends from the Wabanaki Confederacy—which she learned growing up in the farming community of Blomidon, Nova Scotia—as an interwoven framing device. She does not have a cultural connection to the legends, and her use of them has the effect of othering the original First Nations inhabitants of the region, seen only as ghosts with no mention of their living descendants and culture. The Wabanaki legends are entangled with Blomidon’s history, and Dwyer seems unable to dissociate the cultural scavenging on which her home is built from her sense of self. Whatever Dwyer may have meant to broach with the book—and one could rightly argue any number of broad themes for the work—it becomes an unintended meditation on appropriation. (Oct.)